The problem with composing a Christmas post is thinking of anything even remotely interesting to say. The themes have been tropes for centuries now: family, generosity, joy, the birth of a little bugger in Bethlehem (who is also from Nazareth?) who would go on to change the fate of the world. What the hell is interesting about yet another post about the Reason for the Season. What more could possibly be said?
I’m sure pastors/preachers/ministers/priests have this problem every year. Oh good, the Christmas Sermon: one of the two big days for churches where you may get more than the small cadre of every Sunday warriors to preach at. And the material is limited. Oh, so limited. Nobody came for your exegesis on Colossians. Nobody came for your thoughts on how we are called to be good stewards of the environment. Your homily on why faith without works is dead will fall, not on faithful, but dead ears. No, people want to hear about Christmas.
The narrative of the nativity is confusing. Because we all grow up hearing all the stories, a mash-mash of what is laid out in the gospels: shepherds and wise men, an angel visiting Mary (or Joseph), we even get a cameo from an unborn John the Baptist in one.
But I hate to tell you: but they are all different and they all conflict. In one, there’s a genocide afoot and our protagonists flee to Egypt. In another, there’s a census. One has wise men, and the other has shepherds. Look, there are a lot of other differences, but just to save our time, let me tell you: they are incompatible stories.
The most boring among us think that all the gospels must be gospel truth (heh) and as a result, try and weave the stories together into one megastory. Each gospel has to be telling the Truth, so it’s necessary to believe every fact laid out, so we have to play some games to harmonize the various tales into one big story.
The thing is, this behavior robs of appreciating each text for what it is, and for what story it is trying to tell. I don’t believe the point of the gospels is to lay down some kind of uninterested history of the time, or to give a Robert Caro biography of the most famous man in history. They are closer to legends, meant to be read as such. Matthew wants to illustrate that he is not just great, but the promised messiah to the Jewish people. Luke wants to show that not only is he great, but he is the savior for all mankind. You look at the stories in these lights, and they become much richer, much more interesting, much more illuminating.
Am I saying some of the nativity narrative is fiction? It almost certainly is. It’s a story from millennia ago, captured by people writing decades after, from sources nobody can audit. Am I saying it is in any way less interesting because of it?
I’ve known people through my life who have refused to read fiction because they believe there is nothing to learn from it. That if you wanted to read something, it should be factual, with facts to learn and absorb. As if fiction was not something that one could learn from, whether about society, others, or the totality of the human condition.
We can absolutely learn things from fiction. And we can absolutely learn things, and appreciate things, from a set of possibly partially fictionalized accounts of the goings-on around the birth of a person who probably lived but exists now not both in legend and in everyday actions taken by millions of people around the globe, for better or for worse.
So, go ahead, read the great nativity stories in the Bible. They’re great stories! They have great lessons! Just give them a little extra appreciation for telling their own stories, with their own aims and their own agendas. And then pour yourself a drink and listen to The Fairytale of New York by the Pogues, a gospel in its own right (and tells a fictional story).
